MADAME PEPITA: Well, I'm not. I'm not married. I mean, yes I am; but it's just the same as if I wasn't because my husband, that is, the man I thought was my husband ... I want you to know so you won't think ... You see, it was this way: My parents were good, honest people, my mother was lady's maid and my father butler in the house of the Counts de la Vega de Lezo--you have heard of them?--but I always had a taste for clothes, so I went with some French women to be a dressmaker in Buenos Aires; and when I got there I met the father of this child. I was young and impressionable then. He was a Russian--no doubt about that--and we got married, church and all, but without his settling anything on me, because it isn't done out there, and I thought he was the manager of a printing house; but two months afterwards he turned out to be a duke--yes, sir, a Russian duke, who, because he was the black sheep of the family, had been shipped off to America, and then his father died, and he inherited, and had to go back to his own country. But that wasn't the worst of it. The worst of it was he was ... he was married already in Russia to a woman of his own rank, and he ran off with her. So when this poor child came into the world, she hadn't any father. But I kept right on sewing, and when he got back to Russia, he sent me money, for it is only fair to admit he was always a gentleman, and then I came back to Spain, and established myself in business, and since I've got taste, if I do say it myself, we've gotten ahead. But it's a long time now since he went away, and I haven't seen him for sixteen years, and my daughter doesn't know him at all, and she never will, for we don't even know whether he is alive or dead, and probably he has other children, anyway; and here I am neither married nor single, and not even a widow! So you see that I have plenty of reason for being unhappy.